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The art of war Jonathan Richards I For The New Mexican Cutie and the Boxer, documentary, not rated, in Japanese with subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3 chiles Any woman who has ever subordinated her ambitions and her career to those of a man (and you know who you are) will identify with this sometimes charming, sometimes uncomfortable, and often poignant documentary about Noriko and Ushio Shinohara, a couple of Japanese-American artists who have been struggling in the New York art scene for better than 40 years. Until recently, Ushio has been the visible one. As a young man in Tokyo, he established himself as a formidable young Turk of the art word with his “boxing paintings,” action-drip works created by the wiry bantamweight artist strapping paint-soaked sponges to boxing gloves and going a few rounds with a large canvas. He came to New York at the end of the ’60s to make his splash in a world-class pond. And while he made a reputation and hung out with Andy Warhol and the stars of the New York art world, somehow none of that ever translated into the big bucks. In 1972 a pretty 19-year-old art student named Noriko came to New York from Japan to pursue her dreams. There she met the swaggering bad boy with the boxing gloves and the big reputation and fell in love. She moved in with him (and started paying his rent), and a few months later she was pregnant. Ushio was 21 years older than Noriko. Between her son, Alex, and her self-centered, immature husband, Noriko found herself with two children to raise.
Noriko Shinohara
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PASATIEMPO I September 13-19, 2013
Bam! Biff! Pow!: Ushio Shinohara
Ushio was an alcoholic until recent years, when he developed an allergy to liquor that left him gasping for breath when he drank. Old home movies and clips from a 1979 documentary show the middleaged Ushio in maudlin bouts of boozy carousing with his friends. The movie doesn’t go into the effect his alcoholism had on his career, but the question hangs there. Alex, who grew up with an alcoholic father as a role model, is now an artist with the same inclination toward drink. When they met, Ushio was the star, and the teenaged Noriko assumed the role of assistant, and then wife and mother (not in that order; they were not married until 1979). Over the years, Ushio has seen no reason to upset that balance. “The average one has to support the genius,” he says, and there is no question in his mind who is which. “I’m not his assistant,” Noriko tells us. “It’s better I make my work. But sometimes I help, because it’s an emergency.” “Because I’m husband,” Ushio says, with a twinkle that does not disguise his underlying conviction. Noriko shakes her head and laughs. “You are so pitiful!” The digs and the wounds and the depths of the friction in this four-decade relationship are on clear display. But so is the affection. The perennial shortage of money is part of the problem. The movie begins on Ushio’s 80th birthday, and one of the first bits of news we get is that they don’t know where the money is coming from to pay the rent. They live in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, where they share a studio — it used to be all Ushio’s, and to be fair, he does work a lot bigger, executing fantastic brightly painted larger-than-life cardboard motorcycle sculptures, among other projects. But in recent years Noriko has put her foot down and claimed her
half of the studio space for herself, citing Virginia Woolf as her authority for a woman needing a room of her own. Noriko talks about the deadening effect that their relationship has had on her art, so it is a bit of a surprise to check the record and find that her work has been shown in dozens of exhibitions in New York and Japan dating back to 1981. But it was with her development of her alter ego, the cartoon character of Cutie, that Noriko really came into her own. The name comes from an encounter with a young man on the street who called out to the then-50ish Noriko, “Hi, cutie!” Cutie is introduced to us naked (“because she is so poor,” Noriko explains), and we see her in a number of moods as she deals with her life and her difficult husband, to whom she assigns the name Bullie. Noriko executes these ink drawings in notebooks in the form of something like a graphic novel, and when the Japanese owner of a Soho gallery comes to see Ushio’s work, she persuades him to have a look at her work as well. “This series was first entitled ‘Child-raising hell,’” she tells the admiring gallery owner, “but later it turned into ‘Ushio raising hell.’ ” Filmmaker Zachary Heinzerling makes himself invisible, blending into the Shinoharas’ life so naturally that we are not aware of another presence in the room. The result is a sometimes startling window on a relationship that has been through the strain of ego and poverty and alcoholism, but for which things seem to be looking up. “We are like two flowers in one pot,” Noriko explains philosophically. “Sometimes we don’t get enough nutrients for both of us. But when everything goes well, we become two beautiful flowers. So it’s either heaven or hell.” ◀